Another angry, confused, condemning white voice

A fundamental choice we make when trying to understand societies, cultures or individuals is deciding whether we believe humanity is, at its essence, good or bad - or whether it possesses no innate moral qualities. Unless we proceed from a position of innate badness, and I don’t, then we need to find understandings for harmful behaviour, not prescriptions for how they should change - or how others should force them to change.

Looking at the oldest continuous civilisation in the world, its very longevity would be a pretty good argument for its inherent stability and capacity to provide for its members’ needs. While there is presently much needed discussion about the nature of Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, the tenor of the debate has frequently been hysterical, uninformed and ahistorical, with an assumption that outsiders have a better understanding of both the problems and the solutions involved in contemporary Indigenous life. When I first started reading “Last Drinks - The Impact of the Northern Territory Intervention” by Paul Toohey (Quarterly Essay)(extract PDF 60KB) I got that familiar, sinking feeling. Another angry, confused, condemning white voice.

Four years ago, when I first started living and working in the Territory I suspected that it would be years, if not decades, before non-Indigenous Australia engaged with northern Australian Indigenous people.

Then came Nanette Rogers’ shocking revelations, Mal Brough’s ideological emotionalism and the shock and awe of the Intervention. While participants’ motivations differed, they all contributed to painting a picture of Indigenous people and society as empty vessels filled only with alcohol and indolence, all culture, compassion and humanity gone and forgotten.

Suddenly Indigenous issues were at the heart of the national debate.

But where were Indigenous people? They were the frequent object of our gaze, rarely heard unless they seemed to agree with us, but generally excluded, particularly if their communication style didn’t conform to the demands of Anglo-Australian culture and language.

Accordingly, while urging Indigenous people to join the “mainstream” we unselfconsciously talked about us and them, as if we didn’t really expect them to be participating in the national debate or to be hurt by being treated as outsiders in their own country. Paul Toohey sadly continues this exclusion, arguing, rather bizarrely, that “adapting was never going to be easy - for us, that is, not them. They, on the other hand, learned to run us ragged” (p3 - my emphasis).

There was so much I found wrong-headed or offensive about this piece that I wanted to scream my disagreement. But Toohey is quite difficult to disagree with because he so often disagrees with himself. In one place (p3) he says that Indigenous ties to land go “well beyond any white notion of real estate”, in another (p6) he calls land rights a “luxury”. He acknowledges (p58) that “Aborigines had always been evaluated against white society. Their culture was never assessed according to its own standards - perhaps because we outsiders never understood them” but shows scant interest in understanding or any acknowledgement that his lack of understanding might impede his ability to effectively analyse - instead he angrily revs his rhetorical vehicle “making sure they [wear] more of [his] dust than needed” (p7).

While appearing to blame Indigenous people for the situation they find themselves in, he acknowledges that Ben Pascoe, his “old mate”, has become “increasingly resentful of interfering whites” (p55), to the extent of resigning from a “good job” (p55). What does this mean? Instead of making this dissatisfaction a major theme of the essay, engaging with Indigenous people’s experience and wisdom, it’s left untouched, a tantalisingly unexplored idea in the midst of Toohey’s Conradian journey through the “swill” (p28), the “shithole[s]” (p58), the lazy (p6) Indigenes, “accomplished at seeing things selectively” (p5).

His journey into the Heart of Darkness, unlike Conrad’s, shows very little self-reflection, very little compassion or understanding and negligible historical context. And, again unlike Conrad, who saw the sickness of colonialism as central to an understanding of colonised people’s situation, Toohey appears to align himself with the new political correctness which dismisses such concerns as mere “white guilt”.

Guilt or no guilt, colonialism happened and no amount of looking the other way will change the damage that is has done and continues to do. Colonialism is a fact and we need to understand it if we are to understand Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia.

Throughout the essay, Toohey quotes Indigenous people, then squanders the opportunity to engage more fully with their viewpoint. For instance, he quotes Peter Danaga as saying “we think ceremony is more important than school” (p55) (unfortunately his ignorance of ceremony is so profound that he thinks that the presence of women and children means a ceremony “wasn’t secret business” (p9)). Perhaps if he’d had a deeper appreciation of ceremony, he’d have realised that it is much more than painting up, dancing and listening to a man “prowling about … in the manner of an evangelist” (p9).

If he’d listened further, he may have discovered that ceremony is school, it is university and is widely referred to as such by Indigenous people. He may have discovered that the Anglo-Australian education system has so little interest in the gifts that the world’s oldest continuous culture has to offer it that it can’t even be bothered to teach kids in their own language, that it doesn’t even teach them English for the most part, preferring to continue its pigheaded, failed strategy of teaching them in English, as if by just talking at them, students will magically pick up not only the content component of the lesson, but will also somehow learn this foreign language.

Of the incredibly rich and complex philosophy, science and theory of social relations (to name just a few branches of Indigenous knowledge) there is no sign in the classroom. As in the wider society, Indigenous people and knowledge remain invisible.

Instead of working together, building on the vast resources already there, our education system prefers to wipe the slate clean and teach the natives our ways. Little wonder then that school is poorly attended.

(For those that doubt this richness, perhaps the words of a non- Indigenous person who knows some of this complexity may convince you otherwise. Nearing the completion of an anthropology doctorate he told me, in all seriousness, that the immense body of knowledge in just one song cycle is greater than that in a whole PhD.)

For Toohey too, these immense intellectual resources are invisible - he doesn’t want to know (p9), regarding this heritage as being “indoctrinated by a tribe” (p9). Indoctrination, however, is a far more apt description for the cultural imperialism being practised - albeit incompetently - by the education system and the wider non-Indigenous society.

While he seems, at best, ambivalent about Indigenous culture and law (or lore as he calls it), Toohey has no such second thoughts about permits or land rights. Land rights, he asserts, have brought “isolation, deprivation and indolence” (p9) to communities, full of “unmotivated Aborigines stew[ing] in their own inactivity or ineffectiveness” (p20).

Permits are in reality a systematised granting of access to private land, a fundamental tenet of land ownership being the right to control access - unpermitted entry to any private land is called trespass. Why this should be any different for Aboriginal people is not explained. Despite widespread implications otherwise, including by Toohey here, the only people who have power to evict people from Aboriginal land, or even ask to see a permit, are police. Additionally, contrary to the implication at p80, even before the Intervention, permits were issued as a matter of course to all public servants at Ministerial discretion, with no control by the Land Councils. For someone who has had such intimate contact with the permit system the ignorance of such basic facts is startling.

While Toohey talks up assimilation and talks down Indigenous culture (and assumes our right to change it as we see fit - e.g. “the society … had to be addressed and corrected” (p19, my emphasis)) he, perhaps wisely, avoids broaching the subject of places like Redfern, where Indigenous people - without the encumbrances of land rights, permits, remoteness, Indigenous language - are still holding onto their identity, still stubbornly refusing to become white and are still marginalised by non-Indigenous society.

Until those of us who are non-Indigenous can live in harmony with our Indigenous sisters and brothers in The Block, we should stop telling them what’s in their best interests.

But then maybe Toohey does think that it’s Anglo-Australian society’s corrosive influence that is the cause of today’s problems. In his “baffling, self cancelling … way” (p53) while he talks about the horrors of permits and land rights, he also makes it clear that “it [is] in the main [Anglo-Australian dominated] towns … where most of the violence and abuse [is] happening” (p14). Indeed, he ends this deeply confused piece with the heart-breaking story of Sophia, “a town girl, not a bush girl” (p97).

His demonisation of land rights and permits sits very uncomfortably with his assertions that problems are worst where Indigenous people live in close contact with non-Indigenous culture.

So, what are we to conclude from Toohey’s self-contradictory and unreflective essay? In one sense, it’s hard to conclude anything, as there seems to be little in the way of a consistent or clear argument.

Perhaps, however, this essay is useful, for both Indigenous and non- Indigenous Australians, shedding light onto Anglo-Australia’s acutely conflicted and contradictory attitudes and the profound lack of understanding non-Indigenous people have of the beauty, complexity, depth and breadth of Indigenous culture.

Perhaps, too, we can all reflect on what’s missing from this essay. We could engage with the consistent desire for reconciliation expressed by Indigenous people since contact. Those of us non-Indigenous Australians could take heed of the words of another non-Indigenous voice when striving to reach a richer understanding of our fellow Australians:

... on the evidence the Aborigines have always been looking for two things: a decent union of their lives with ours but on terms that let them preserve their own identity, not their inclusion willy-nilly in our response to scheme of things on a fake identity, but development within a new way of life that has the imprint of their own ideas. Stanner - After the Dreaming ABC Boyer Lecture, 1968, ABC 1969.

We could engage with each other, creating dialogue, understanding and respect, so that when the next Quarterly Essay on Indigenous issues appears we have a more nuanced, rounded understanding to build upon. Perhaps, perhaps - as Indigenous people consistently indicate - there’s another way and perhaps the overwhelming rejection of the Intervention by people living in the affected communities (as the secret ballot at the last election clearly showed) shows that people want less, not more, control over their lives; and they want more, not less, autonomy and respect; they want more, not less, of their law recognised by European Australia; they want more, not less, reconciliation.

Let’s all work together to bring that day closer.